Post navigation

DIY Lego Activity Table with Storage – Ikea Hack

Although there are a few commercially available lego tables and activity tables most of them, unless ridiculously expensive, are quite small. Since my eldest son inherited all my Lego collection, plus had some of his own, we wanted a pretty big table, with a substantial amount of storage.

When we had to move out of our large office into a smaller one while we shuffled the kids rooms around before our third was born we no longer had room for both my wife and myself to have desks in the office. That left us with a 150cm x 75cm Ikea Vika Amon table top with no where to use it.

Thus was born my son’s Lego table!

The components used in building this Lego Activity Table were:

1 x 150cm x 75cm Ikea Vika Amon table top

4 x Ikea Trofast medium size storage boxes

4 x Pre-cut coffee table legs and bases from Home Depot

2.5m 1″ x 2″ fir timber

3m 1″ x 1″ fir timber

Wood glue

1 1/2″ standard nails

2 3/4″ wood screws

We also decided to put a display shelf on his activity table, so to do this we got the 119cm wide EKBY JÄRPEN EKBY TÖRE table top shelf. It included the shelf as well as the two desktop mounting brackets to attach them to the activity table top.

Once we chose all the components that we needed for the table the construction was fairly straight forward, with only a few noticeable errors on my part …

To fit four Trofast storage boxes under the Lego activity table the table legs will need to be installed as close to the four corners as possible. This was my first mistake as I initially installed the table legs in the same location that the previous Ikea Vika legs were installed. Woops.

After my initial mistake with the table legs I attached the metal base 2cm inside the outer edge of the table. This gave me enough clearance to fit all four Trofast storage boxes between the legs…

My next step was to build the timber runners for the storage boxes. I choose fir because it was a much harder wood than pine, and hopefully would take a bit more of a beating as well…

I cut five 40cm lengths of the 1×2 and 1×1 timber and then glued and nailed them together to for the runners.

While the glue was trying on the timber runners I found the exact middle on the table top and marked off the location for the centre runner. Once the runners were ready I then glued and screwed the first runner into place.

After attaching the first runner I then proceeded to install the other runners, carefully measuring the distance and making sure that the runners are perfectly square to one another. Unfortunately one of the runners I attached wasn’t exactly right and the storage box wouldn’t slide without getting stuck. Thankfully I found that out before the glue had dried and was able to remove it and try again, but it could have been a real mess had the glue dried.

After all the glue had dried and everything was lined up the four Trofast storage boxes slid in nicely, and then proceeded to fall right out the back of the storage table.

Woops again…

Thankfully I had some of the 1×1 timber left over so I cut four 10cm pieces and glued and screwed them at the back of the runners so that the boxes would stop sliding out the back.

At this point you could paint or stain the table legs to match the table top or other furniture in the room. We choose to leave it raw, mainly because we couldn’t agree on what colour or stain to use on it …

Once that was finished and dried it was as simple as following the direction to install the EKBY JÄRPEN / EKBY TÖRE desk top shelf to finish it off and we were done. One DIY Lego Activity table with storage…

Wow! I must say this storage idea is really brilliant and definitely a hack to be shared for good! Lego pieces could really mess up the place and to keep things neat and tidy, quite a number of boxes would be required to organize all the bits and pieces. To actually have all that but still able to conceal them under the table is indeed ingenious.

It's really quite a good idea if you just need to get some extra storage fixed up in a room but while the idea seems rather interesting, I don't think that there's enough room for legs under there once the storage containers have been slid in. But, at a standing desk or work desk or even perhaps in the garage, this could possibly work!

IKEA components are lovely and always so efficiently modular when it comes to storage! I'm thinking this idea is amazingly simple for any type of thing that requires storage and quite easy to do on other counter tops too! Cheers!